“We have these kids who grew up here, went to school here. They’re American kids, they have no other home and essentially we’re abandoning them,” said Hawkins. “They have a hard time getting an education and they have no prospects for work.”

So they are funding a nonprofit that offers basic information about looking for ways to gain legal immigration status and scholarship money to go to school. And it has been working, to a point.

The nonprofit, Educators for Fair Consideration, has helped students to get through college by assisting them financially. It is after these kids graduate that the trouble begins.

Executive Director Katharine Gin says that when the group started in 2006, “[a] lot of us were telling these students: ‘Just get through college and we’ll worry about the rest later.'” But as Gin explained, “now people are trying to figure out what we can do, trying to figure out something meaningful if we can’t trust that immigration reform is going to happen.”

The problem is that whereas a private organization can help students to find the scholarship money they need to get through college, either by creating scholarships themselves or by searching out pre-existing available funds, it is only the government that can issue legal work visas and there are very few legal employment-based visas. The vast majority of those, meanwhile are for temporary agricultural workers (and not enough of those), or highly-skilled temporary and permanent work visas. You can’t really get a high-skilled work visa if you’ve just earned your bachelor’s degree

On the other hand, part of the objection to the DREAM Act is that the legislation puts illegal students on a path to citizenship without requiring them to finish their degree. Another serious objection is that naturalized US citizens are eligible to sponsor a wide-range of family members for their own green cards.

So here’s a solution: Amend the STAPLE Act. Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) propses a bill “to authorize certain aliens who have earned a Ph.D. degree from a United States institution of higher education in a field of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics to be admitted for permanent residence.”

Why not include illegal undergraduates who complete their studies and stipulate that recipients of any STAPLE green card are ineligible to sponsor others for similar status.

You’d solve the objections to the DREAM Act for some Republicans and solve the objections of Democrats to the STAPLE Act.

What you wouldn’t solve is our broken legal immigration system that should be based on the nation’s employment needs rather than family reunification. But perhaps the immigration reform mantra should become “little steps for little feet.”